by Pablo Neruda

Translated by Ernie Jones

The Great Ocean

by Pablo Neruda

Translated by Ernie Jones

If your gifts and your destructions, Ocean, could bequeath
to my hands one portion, one fruit, one ferment,
I would choose your distant repose, your steel lines,
your expanse sentried by the air and the night,
and the energy of your white language
that destroys and tumbles its columns
onto its own demolished purity.Continue Reading

The cicadas are four years early. They were supposed to emerge from their underground burrows in 2021, but the seventeen-year cicadas — or some of them anyway — have gotten itchy and decided 2017 is close enough for rock and roll.

Entomologists have no idea why this generation has decided to buck the system, but you can hardly blame them. Thirteen years of sucking on tree roots should be more than enough for anybody.

These early emergers they call “Brood X”, and maybe it’s because I’m an elder member of Generation X that I sympathize. Like them, I tend to stay in one place for years and then, for reasons even I don’t understand, I get the need to light out, change the scene, see the world.Continue Reading

People who only know a little about something tend to overestimate their understanding of it, while experts tend to underestimate their own expertise.

That may seem strange at first glance, but when you stop and think, it makes sense. When you’ve only learned a little, you don’t know what you don’t know. The landscape is simple and pastel. You think you’ve got it.

But the more you learn, the more details you see, and the better you come to understand there’s a lot more detail that you can’t see.

I like taking vacations alone. In fact, I like places where there’s no internet, no TV, sometimes even no cell phone connections.

Few years back, I was spending just such a solo trip on Andros Island in the Bahamas — which is about the size of the state of Delaware and has roughly the population of the town of Tyrone, GA — at a lovely little eco-resort called Small Hope Bay Lodge, when one night at the tiny beachside tiki bar I got into a conversation with a businessman about success.

Like most American businessmen, he was a nice and affable fellow, indelibly optimistic and willing to talk to anybody. And he believed that the secret to success was hard work.

“Guys like you and me,” he said, “we work hard. That’s what it takes. Some people just aren’t willing to put in the effort. You get what you give in this world.”